1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for extracting a part where an operator elicits a useful information from a customer (hereinafter referred to as a “part-to-elicit”) from spoken dialogue data between an operator and a customer so that the operator or the person who are involved can listen to the particular content efficiently. Further, the present invention relates to a method for causing a computer to execute processing the above-mentioned apparatus carries out.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many call centers, spoken dialogue data between an operator and a customer has been stored so that speeches regarding numeric values such as quantity and amount or the content of a trouble can be checked later. A large amount of data accumulated in a call center is used as data for checking the content of conversation. In addition, the spoken dialogue data is also used as data for evaluating the conversation skill of an operator. Further, the spoken dialogue data is referred to by a product repair worker or a re-acceptance customer service representative for checking the content of repair or the last inquiry by listening to the information provided by the customer to the operator in the conversation, and the like.
When the spoken dialogue data is utilized, it is sufficient if only a necessary part can be listened to according to utilization purposes. To listen to all the conversation from the beginning of the spoken dialogue data to the end requires a lot of time and is not efficient. In the spoken dialogue data between the customer and the operator, a part where the operator gets the content of inquiry, a question or a notification is, so to speak, the core part in a conversation. A mechanism is required which makes it possible to determine and reproduce only this part as a “part-to-elicit”.
Among conventional techniques, there is a method in which a keyword extracted by speech recognition, information about an operation performed by an operator on a terminal screen, or the like is attached to spoken dialogue data as an index, and this is used to find a starting point when the spoken dialogue data is reproduced (see Patent Document 1 “Japanese Patent Laid-Open Number 11-25112”, for example).
However, even if a keyword or information about an operation by an operator which indicates the content of conversation is attached to spoken dialogue data as an index, it is impossible to know in what context the keyword or information is attached. Therefore, in order to find out a “part-to-elicit”, it is required that a person concerned must actually listen to the spoken dialogue data from the position of an index considered to be related and check the content.
Furthermore, even if the starting position of the “part-to-elicit” can be specified based on the index, it is not possible to specify a range to listen to because the ending position is not specified by the index. Therefore, it is not possible to know the time required to listen to the “part-to-elicit” in advance.